Margarita Simonyan

Chief Editor, RT and Rossiya Segodnya

“The international company Ipsos is researching RT’s audience at our request. According to the company’s data, over the course of the last two years our audience has grown by one-third. 100 million people in 47 countries are now watching RT every week. RT’s Website in Arabic has beaten all other Arabic language channels, including the famous Al Jazeera and Al Arabyia, in terms of the number of visitors. Our Spanish Website is outpacing the BBC and CNN in Spanish.”

: Simonyan’s numbers are correct for RT Arabic but false for RT Spanish

Correction:

In the initial publication of this story, dated October 1, 2018, BBC Spanish audience data was extracted incorrectly from Similarweb.com.

Because Polygraph.info was not a Similarweb.com subscriber, we were restricted to using data for parent websites. The BBC Spanish website, BBC Mundo, is a "subfolder" of the parent BBC website (https://www.bbc.com/mundo), while the RT Spanish website, RT Actualidad, is itself a parent (https://actualidad.rt.com/). Consequently, the 413 million visit figure for BBC Mundo was erroneous, while the 38 million visit figure for RT was correct.

Polygraph.info has since extracted data specific to BBC Mundo using a commercial account. The correct data, as shown below, shows that the audience for BBC Mundo and RT Actualidad, for the March-August 2018 timeframe, is roughly similar, at 11-12 million visits per month.

Despite the findings above, the content of the original fact check means that the verdict for Margarita Simonyan’s statement remains “partially true;” though she provided accurate information about RT traffic in Arabic and Spanish, RT’s chief editor incorrectly attributed the traffic analyses to IPSOS and withheld information about multiple legal charges RT is facing internationally.

The information provided above is a correction of the original fact check below:

RT chief editor Margarita Simonyan’s statement, which she made during a call-in program on Ekho Moskvy (Echo of Moscow) radio station, consists of several verifiable claims about the audience for the Russian state media outlet. We have checked each of them separately.

Since Simonyan refers to Ipsos – a global market research and a consulting firm headquartered in Paris, France – we first reached out to their press office.

RUSSIA -- A Russia's state-controlled Russia Today (RT) television broadcast van is seen parked in front of St. Basil's Cathedral and the Kremlin next to Red Square in Moscow, March 16, 2018

Athanas Jamo, Ipsos senior research manager in Dubai, told Polygraph.info that he was the one who “handled the RT global study.”

Jamo confirmed that the two studies, conducted in 2015 and 2017, indeed showed that RT’s weekly viewership is 100 million globally.

However, Jamo said the second part of Simonyan’s claim was not part of the study and therefore cannot be attributed to Ipsos.

“Ipsos is not measuring the online performances and traffic of RT. As far as I know, their online figures are based on comScore,” Jamo said, referring to the American media measurement and analytics company that provides marketing data and analytics to enterprises, media and advertising agencies, and publishers. We contacted ComScore, but the company had not responded as of the time this fact-check was published.

There is, however, an open source intelligence tool, Similarweb.com, which makes possible real-time tracking of Website traffic, as well as comparing Websites and providing analyses of both Websites and applications.

Simonyan’s claim that RT in Arabic beat Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya in terms of Website traffic is true for the last six months.

According to Similarweb.com’s most recent data, Al Jazeera’s total number of visits during the last six months was 12.99 million, while RT Arabic had 22.98 million visitors during the same period.

But the numbers are very much against Simonyan in her claim regarding BBC in Spanish. With its 38.69 million visits, RT’s audience numbers are far below BBC Spanish, which had 413.02 million visits during the last six months.

While Margarita Simonyan is partially correct about RT’s success with Arabic and Spanish speaking audiences, she gave a misleading answer when a listener questioned her about RT’s credibility.

“Was there any intelligence analyses conducted on how much the foreign viewers trust your channel,” the person identified as “Antosha” asked.

Simonyan responded with the above-analyzed statistics, adding that “legendary Rodger Waters” and “not less legendary Emir Kusturica” praised RT for its content. She, however, failed to mention the accusations the Russian state broadcaster faces in several countries over its content and its purpose.

In the United States, RT stands accused of efforts to undermine the electoral process as part of an investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. A Polygraph.info investigation into RT’s FARA (Foreign Agent Registration Act) registration found that RT falsely stated its purpose in publishing overseas. Polygraph.info revealed the outlet’s Russian government ownership, hidden under the umbrella of a non-profit organization.